Life: It Goes On - October 26

Happy Sunday! Not sure what happened to last week. We were in Missouri last weekend and didn't get home until early evening Sunday, but I started a post on Monday that just never got finished. Then no reviews got written, either. I'm reading, just not blogging. Hence, I'm way behind on reviews. I'm going to try to remedy that the next couple of weeks, but reviews will probably be pretty short. 

The Last Couple of Weeks I: 

Listened To: The Book of Gothel by Mary McMyne, started Jason Mott's People Like Us (but gave up on that one, for the time being), and then started Jean Kwok's Searching For Sylvie Lee. 

Watched: It's that time of year: MLB playoffs, lots of football, lots of college women's volleyball.

Read: I finished Barbara Comyns' Our Spoons Came From Woolworths and I'm about two-thirds of the way through by Jessica Guerreri. When I'm finished with it, I picked up Mrs. Quinn's Rise To Fame by Olivia Ford on Thursday so I'll start that. 

Made: The viral ramen French onion soup, which I added portobello mushrooms to for some protein. It was surprisingly good and so quick and easy to make. It's definitely something we'll make again. But it's got me jonesing for real French onion soup so I picked up the ingredients to make that this coming week. Also made Miss H's favorite "goulash" recipe, but don't tell her that. 

With my brother and sister-in-law
at Logboat Brewing. 

Enjoyed: Time last weekend with my brother and his whole family (always fun to see how much the great-nieces and -nephews have grown since we last saw them; book club on Tuesday; dinner last night with friends; and getting a date set for Mini-him's and Miss C's wedding. Somehow having a date makes it feel more real and has us shopping for pre-nuptial dinner locations already. To be honest, that's kind of an excuse to eat out more often for the next few weeks while we try to find the perfect place!

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: Besides doing spring cleaning, I'm prone to doing fall cleaning as well (inside and out) and I'm deep into that this weekend and will continue into the next week. As nice as our weather has been, we still haven't had to clean up gardens and pots yet, but it's time to do that. That means there are already herbs and flower seeds drying and final crops to handle. 

Thinking About: Ways to distract myself from politics and what's happening in our country. 

Feeling: I slept ten and a half hours last night so I'm feeling very rested today! 

Looking forward to: My birthday, my hair appointment, our anniversary, and a wedding are all this week. 

Question of the week: Do you do fall cleaning as well?

Life: It Goes On - October 12

Happy Sunday! I am dragging today. When I said yesterday that I might not get anything done today, I really thought I was joking, but it was only about 5 p.m. that I accomplished anything other than to feed myself. Well, I did finish a book so I didn't entirely waste the day. 

Headed down to K.C. Friday early morning to help Miss H move. She had rented a truck this time so that helped; but moving from your own one-bedroom apartment into a house with a friend who already has a house full meant a lot of thinking had to go into what was going to fit into her bedroom and what else she could store in the basement. And, of course, what got sent back to our house for storage in our basement. It never ends! 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I was still listening to Sarah Damoff's The Bright Years when my loan expired. Since then I've been struggling to find something that catches my attention with no success. Instead I've been listening to Jon Batiste and the Beatles on Spotify. 

Watched: All The Bright Places (based on the book of the same name by Jennifer Niven) and Begin Again, starring Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightly, Catherine Keener, Hailee Steinfeld, and Adam Levine. 

Read: I finished Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall and started Our Spoons Came From Woolworth by Barbara Comyns, as recommended by Ann Patchett. 

Made: Nothing remarkable. We're still harvesting a lot of tomatoes so those are featured in some way in every meal we've been eating. 

Enjoyed: Time with Miss H; even if the physical work of moving her was no fun, time with her is always good. 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: On finding a home for the things that got sent home with us. Otherwise, it's time to start cleaning up potted plants. 

Thinking About: How I will pay movers whatever it costs to do the heavy lifting the next time one of my kids moves! 

Feeling: Tired yet. 

Looking forward to: Another long weekend and a trip to south. 

Question of the week: What do you think is worse: packing to move or unpacking when you've arrived? 

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

352 pages

Published June 2025 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.

My Thoughts: 

That publisher's summary also calls this book "fast-paced," which I found interesting because I didn't find it fast-paced at all. It starts off with a literal bang, but then we go back in time and find out how Joan found herself sitting at CAPCOM when STS-LR9 was on its mission, which slows things down considerably. Which was not necessarily a bad thing. It gives readers time to get to know Joan, her sister, Barbara, niece Frances, and her NASA friends. But there is also a lot in this book that could easily have been trimmed out; I often felt like Reid was stuck in "tell" not "show" mode. 

Taking readers back to the beginning of the space shuttle program allows Reid a chance to not only dig into the science of that program, but the norms of that time as well. Barbara, who found herself a single mom early, spends the rest of the book trying to get to the life she expected - married woman with an easy life. Joan, on the other hand, has never had any interest in having a man in her life, absorbed as she is in science and the universe, a life that was still new for women in that time. But it's when Joan finally finds love that she really blazes a trail far different from her sister, one that might risk her career. 

I applaud Reid taking that risk in the book (although it's not the first time that risk has appeared in one of her books) and I felt like she had really done her research when it came to the space program. All of the training and things that happened on the flights felt very real. There are some really interesting (for the most part) characters in this book and I really liked "watching" the astronauts come together as a family. As the book reached the climax, I thought I knew how it would end and felt that was the right ending. At the last minute, Reid veered away from that and I'm still not sure I like the way she ended the book. 

The Woman in Suite 11 by Ruth Ware

The Woman In Suite 11 by Ruth Ware

400 pages

Published July 2025 by Gallery/Scout Press 

Publisher's Summary: 

When the invitation to attend the press opening of a luxury Swiss hotel—owned by reclusive billionaire Marcus Leidmann—arrives, it’s like the answer to a prayer. Three years after the birth of her youngest child, Lo Blacklock is ready to reestablish her journalism career, but post-pandemic travel journalism is a very different landscape from the one she left ten years ago.

The chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva is everything Lo’s ever dreamed of, and she hopes she can snag an interview with Marcus. Unfortunately, he proves to be even more difficult to pin down than his reputation suggests. When Lo gets a late-night call asking her to come to Marcus’s hotel room, she agrees despite her own misgivings. She’s greeted, however, by a woman claiming to be Marcus’s mistress, and in life-or-death jeopardy.

What follows is a thrilling cat-and-mouse pursuit across Europe, forcing Lo to ask herself just how much she’s willing to sacrifice to save this woman...and if she can even trust her?

My Thoughts: 

This is my eighth book by Ware. I found myself, from the start, wondering if it might be my last. 

It's a sequel of sorts to Ware's hit, The Woman In Cabin 10, in which Lo Blacklock finds herself locked in a cabin on a boat, certain she is going to die there. This book opens giving readers the belief that the same thing has happened to Lo again. And that's where Ware first lost me. Could this woman seriously have found herself in exactly the same position ten years later? Didn't Ware have any better story ideas than to rehash the same story? 

By the time this story finally caught up with the teaser opening chapter, I had spent too much time being frustrated with idea that this would be the same story to be very much relieved that it wasn't. 

I will say that the story picked up and I did find myself racing through it. Did I figure out all of the plot twists? No, I didn't; although to be fair to myself, that was partly because some of the plot points felt so preposterous that they never would have occurred to me. But also, yes, I did figure out some of the twists and you'll know by now that if I've figured it out ahead of the denouement, it's pretty obvious. Another problem I had with the book was that there were so many loose threads. Now you might say they were red herrings, but they didn't feel like that and they never got explained away. 

Overall, a disappointment. But let's be honest, I've like Ware enough in the past to give her another chance when her next book comes out.